Effusive endearments and embraces were new to Dam, and he appeared extraordinarily ignorant of the art of kissing.
"Oh, how like his dear Father!" she would exclaim afresh every few minutes, to the Major's slight annoyance and the General's plain disgust.
"Every inch a Stukeley!" he would growl in reply.
But Yvette Seymour Stukeley had prayed for Colonel de Warrenne nightly for seven years and had idealized him beyond recognition.

Possibly Fate's greatest kindness to her was to ordain that she should not see him as he had become in fact, and compare him with her wondrous mental image....

The boy was to her, must be, should be, the very image of her life's hero and beloved....
The depolarized and bewildered Damocles found himself in a strange and truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses, a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles, butlerless and _ghari_[9]-less sahibs, and an utter absence of "natives," sepoys, _byle-gharies_,[10] camels, monkeys, kites, squirrels, bulbuls, _minahs_,[11] mongooses, palm-trees, and temples.
Cattle appeared to have no humps, crows to have black heads, and trees to have no fruit.

The very monsoon seemed inextricably mixed with the cold season.

Fancy the rains coming in the cold weather! Perhaps there was no hot weather and nobody went to the hills in this strange country of strange people, strange food, strange customs.